Downtown Oklahoma City–adorable. Last weekend Cason and I visited some friends from home, who are now stationed in OK City. They were the perfect hosts. They took us to dinner downtown at this place called Texadelphia. Cute little combo of Mexican and Philly cheese steaks. Delicious. Then we played Scattergories together and watched a hilarious Jim Carey movie. I love traveling, and I really like that living in Texas now gives us opportunities to travel to new places without having to drive really far distances.
I had my first statistics exam on Monday, and I did well. I’m thankful that I have this class my first semester in grad school because it is the one class where I’ve learned everything before. Intro to School Psychology is good so far because it has mostly been topics about School Psychology that I researched when looking at different school psych programs. Though my Psychology of Exceptional Children class is pretty new to me, a lot of it seems to be common sense so far. There are loads of acronyms that I’ve never seen before, but I’ve learned them pretty quickly. The biggest aspect of that class so far is that I will serve for 10 hours this semester outside of the classroom. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to tutor a 13-year old boy with Aspergers. I’m really eager to get started, and I’m glad that I will be tutoring him in my favorite subject–math.
Assessment is a completely new class; I never had the opportunity to learn how to administer cognitive abilities assessments. Why would I have needed to? Even though the class is new and sometimes difficult, the subject is interesting and necessary. In order to do my job as a school psychologist well, I have to learn how to administer these assessments. Today I will be administering my first assessment to another classmate. After sitting in class for two weeks “learning” how to administer this assessment, I’m just ready to get the show on the road and actually do it! It’s one thing to listen to someone tell you how to do it, but I have a feeling we will learn more today by administering the test than we have learned in the past two weeks. Experience seems to be the primary teacher in this field thus far.
The theme for the next several years will likely continue to be, “Let’s throw them to the wolves and see how they do.” The perfectionist in me doesn’t always like this idea. I am a planner, and I like to have expectations clearly defined before I embark on a large task. School psychology doesn’t work that way at all. The only way to learn is to attempt, fail, and try again. I like to watch others attempt and fail so that I can learn from that instead of making my own mistakes. Well, that’s not an option here, so I’m still trying to get used to that. Luckily, our first attempts and failures with administering this assessment are pretty low-risk. So we make several mistakes in front of our peers–they’re likely to make similar mistakes. Plus, I understand that they’d rather have us make the big mistakes with our peers and our professors instead of in the school setting.
On another note, I get to fly home next weekend for my cousin’s wedding, and I am SO excited! One, I love flying. Two, I love weddings. Three, I love Georgia. Four, I love my family. (That was in increasing order, if you didn’t notice.) Needless to say, this is going to be a pretty awesome weekend. Now I just have to get through five classes, several homework assignments, two quizzes, and one extra test administration & protocol. Not too bad, right? Honestly, it could be much worse. I’m just thankful for three-day weekends and fun events to look forward to!
a thousand new paths 